Evaluation frameworks

Building reliable agents requires evaluation at every stage of development. Evaluation frameworks provide structured approaches to measure agent quality, validate performance across diverse scenarios, and ensure operational readiness before deployment.

These frameworks help solution architects and developers make informed decisions about agent architecture, from selecting appropriate models to configuring search methods and tool integrations. By establishing clear evaluation criteria early in the development process, teams can identify potential issues, optimize performance, and build confidence in their agent solutions.

This article outlines key components of effective evaluation frameworks and provides guidance for implementing continuous evaluation practices that maintain agent quality over time.

Key components

Each evaluation set should include:

1. Baseline establishment: Effective evaluation begins with establishing baseline measurements of existing system effectiveness. For legacy processes, proxy metrics such as task completion time provide estimates of potential return on investment before progressing to build phases. Capture current performance levels, user satisfaction metrics, and operational costs to enable meaningful comparison with agent-based solutions.

2. Capacity planning: Include samples that represent the upper limits that agents should handle, including grounding file sizes, response times, response and input row counts, and critical language support requirements. Understanding capacity limits prevents deployment of agents that can't handle production workload requirements and informs infrastructure planning decisions.

3. Scenario validation: Comprehensive evaluation requires diverse sets of representative prompts and expected answers covering critical scenarios the agent must deliver. Include variations across multiple dimensions to ensure robust performance. The following table outlines the core dimensions you should validate when assessing an agent's ability to perform reliably across real‑world scenarios. These themes represent common sources of failure—such as misunderstandings of time, location, compliance requirements, or pronoun references—that directly impact user trust, operational accuracy, and organizational readiness. Use this checklist to design comprehensive scenario tests that reflect your environment, your users, and the business‑critical tasks your agents must handle consistently.

   Theme	Details
   Temporal references	Agents must accurately interpret temporal references including "next," "last," "last week," and "this month" without generating incorrect information. Temporal accuracy directly impacts user trust and practical utility of agent responses.
   Location awareness	Agents must correctly handle location-specific queries such as "What is my office mailing address?" and "When is my next meeting in local time?".
   Completeness verification	Agents must provide complete responses including correct counts and comprehensive coverage of available information. Incomplete responses undermine user confidence and operational effectiveness.
   Language precision	Language accuracy evaluation ensures agents use precise terminology without inappropriate pluralization or grammatical errors. Professional communication standards must be maintained across all agent interactions.
   Compliance and override handling	Agents must respect organizational policies, for example, including required disclaimers if instructed. Compliance testing verifies agents properly implement organizational governance requirements.
   Role-specific information	Agents must accurately reflect people or role metadata in a response. For example: "What is the expense policy for customer hospitality?"
   General baseline	Agents must ensure that core content and references are included accurately and consistently. For example, verify that required documents are properly cited in responses.
   Prompt leakage	Evaluation must identify prompt leakage issues including references to internal test data or placeholder organizations that don't exist in grounding documents. Security validation protects against information disclosure and maintains professional presentation.
   Ugly links	Agents must present hyperlinks in a clean, user-friendly format rather than exposing raw URLs, ensuring clarity and professional appearance.
   Globalization support	Agents must correctly interpret date formats, currency representations, and cultural context based on requesting users and situational context. Globalization support ensures agents provide appropriate responses across diverse user populations.
   Pronouns	Evaluation should verify that agents correctly interpret and expand pronouns, including "me," "my," and other context-dependent references. Accurate pronoun resolution improves user experience and response relevance.

Continuous evaluation

You need to reevaluate agents and reestablish baselines when architectural changes occur. These changes include modifications to language models, orchestrators, reasoning models, or tool types. Continuous evaluation ensures operational quality as agent capabilities evolve.

Regular evaluation cycles help you identify performance degradation before it affects user experience. They also provide data for optimization decisions.